Hacking the President’s DNA

[FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer]

Forget hacking the DNA of national leaders, the EVIL US Govt CIA NSA DHS
FBI Psychopaths have been HACKING millions of american and global
public's DNA for more than 40 years and NEURALLY ENSLAVING THEM by
linking their DNA Resonance Frequency to NSA HIVE AI GRID and remotely
TORTURING and operating them like PUPPETS.


Western Whites are completely CLUELESS confused gender perverted LOW IQ
clowns who spend their ENTIRE LIVES sucking and inserting animal, human,
rubber and metal genitals in their orifices and then GOSSIPING, and
hence HAVE NO CLUE what the EVIL CIA NSA FBI DHS psychopaths are doing
to their brains.

Supercomputer AI is CONTROLLING and TORTURING tens of millions of
americans and global public already, without the knowledge and consent
of HUMANS.

NEURALLY ENSLAVED DYSTOPIC TYRANNY has been here for 40+ years.



========================================================================


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/hacking-the-presidents-dna/309147/

Hacking the President’s DNA

The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world
leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama. Decoded,
these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information. In the
not-too-distant future, they may provide something more as well—the
basis for the creation of personalized bioweapons that could take down a
president and leave no trace.

By Andrew Hessel, Marc Goodman, and Steven Kotler

This is how the future arrived. It began innocuously, in the early
2000s, when businesses started to realize that highly skilled jobs
formerly performed in-house, by a single employee, could more
efficiently be crowd-sourced to a larger group of people via the
Internet. Initially, we crowd-sourced the design of T‑shirts
(Threadless.com) and the writing of encyclopedias (Wikipedia.com), but
before long the trend started making inroads into the harder sciences.
Pretty soon, the hunt for extraterrestrial life, the development of
self-driving cars, and the folding of enzymes into novel proteins were
being done this way. With the fundamental tools of genetic
manipulation—tools that had cost millions of dollars not 10 years
earlier—dropping precipitously in price, the crowd-sourced design of
biological agents was just the next logical step.

In 2008, casual DNA-design competitions with small prizes arose; then in
2011, with the launch of GE’s $100 million breast-cancer challenge, the
field moved on to serious contests. By early 2015, as personalized gene
therapies for end-stage cancer became medicine’s cutting edge,
virus-design Web sites began appearing, where people could upload
information about their disease and virologists could post designs for a
customized cure. Medically speaking, it all made perfect sense: Nature
had done eons of excellent design work on viruses. With some retooling,
they were ideal vehicles for gene delivery.

Soon enough, these sites were flooded with requests that went far beyond
cancer. Diagnostic agents, vaccines, antimicrobials, even designer
psychoactive drugs—all appeared on the menu. What people did with these
bio-designs was anybody’s guess. No international body had yet been
created to watch over them.

So, in November of 2016, when a first-time visitor with the handle Cap’n
Capsid posted a challenge on the viral-design site 99Virions, no alarms
sounded; his was just one of the 100 or so design requests submitted
that day. Cap’n Capsid might have been some consultant to the
pharmaceutical industry, and his challenge just another attempt to
understand the radically shifting R&D landscape—really, he could have
been anyone—but the problem was interesting nonetheless. Plus, Capsid
was offering $500 for the winning design, not a bad sum for a few hours’
work.

Later, 99Virions’ log files would show that Cap’n Capsid’s IP address
originated in Panama, although this was likely a fake. The design
specification itself raised no red flags. Written in SBOL, an
open-source language popular with the synthetic-biology crowd, it seemed
like a standard vaccine request. So people just got to work, as did the
automated computer programs that had been written to “auto-evolve” new
designs. These algorithms were getting quite good, now winning nearly a
third of the challenges.

Within 12 hours, 243 designs were submitted, most by these computerized
expert systems. But this time the winner, GeneGenie27, was actually
human—a 20-year-old Columbia University undergrad with a knack for
virology. His design was quickly forwarded to a thriving Shanghai-based
online bio-marketplace. Less than a minute later, an Icelandic synthesis
start‑up won the contract to turn the 5,984-base-pair blueprint into
actual genetic material. Three days after that, a package of
10‑milligram, fast-dissolving microtablets was dropped in a FedEx
envelope and handed to a courier.

Two days later, Samantha, a sophomore majoring in government at Harvard
University, received the package. Thinking it contained a new synthetic
psychedelic she had ordered online, she slipped a tablet into her left
nostril that evening, then walked over to her closet. By the time
Samantha finished dressing, the tab had started to dissolve, and a few
strands of foreign genetic material had entered the cells of her nasal
mucosa.

Some party drug—all she got, it seemed, was the flu. Later that night,
Samantha had a slight fever and was shedding billions of virus
particles. These particles would spread around campus in an
exponentially growing chain reaction that was—other than the mild fever
and some sneezing—absolutely harmless. This would change when the virus
crossed paths with cells containing a very specific DNA sequence, a
sequence that would act as a molecular key to unlock secondary functions
that were not so benign. This secondary sequence would trigger a
fast-acting neuro-destructive disease that produced memory loss and,
eventually, death. The only person in the world with this DNA sequence
was the president of the United States, who was scheduled to speak at
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government later that week. Sure, thousands
of people on campus would be sniffling, but the Secret Service probably
wouldn’t think anything was amiss.

It was December, after all—cold-and-flu season.
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The scenario we’ve just sketched may sound like nothing but science
fiction—and, indeed, it does contain a few futuristic leaps. Many
members of the scientific community would say our time line is too fast.
But consider that since the beginning of this century, rapidly
accelerating technology has shown a distinct tendency to turn the
impossible into the everyday in no time at all. Last year, IBM’s Watson,
an artificial intelligence, understood natural language well enough to
whip the human champion Ken Jennings on Jeopardy. As we write this,
soldiers with bionic limbs are returning to active duty, and autonomous
cars are driving down our streets. Yet most of these advances are small
in comparison with the great leap forward currently under way in the
biosciences—a leap with consequences we’ve only begun to imagine.
Personalized bioweapons are a subtler and less catastrophic threat than
accidental plagues or WMDs. Yet they will likely be unleashed much more
readily.

More to the point, consider that the DNA of world leaders is already a
subject of intrigue. According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009
book In the President’s Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets,
drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched—they are
later sanitized or destroyed—in an effort to keep would‑be malefactors
from obtaining his genetic material. (The Secret Service would neither
confirm nor deny this practice, nor would it comment on any other aspect
of this article.) And according to a 2010 release of secret cables by
WikiLeaks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directed our embassies to
surreptitiously collect DNA samples from foreign heads of state and
senior United Nations officials. Clearly, the U.S. sees strategic
advantage in knowing the specific biology of world leaders; it would be
surprising if other nations didn’t feel the same.

While no use of an advanced, genetically targeted bio-weapon has been
reported, the authors of this piece—including an expert in genetics and
microbiology (Andrew Hessel) and one in global security and law
enforcement (Marc Goodman)—are convinced we are drawing close to this
possibility. Most of the enabling technologies are in place, already
serving the needs of academic R&D groups and commercial biotech
organizations. And these technologies are becoming exponentially more
powerful, particularly those that allow for the easy manipulation of DNA.

The evolution of cancer treatment provides one window into what’s
happening. Most cancer drugs kill cells. Today’s chemotherapies are
offshoots of chemical-warfare agents: we’ve turned weapons into cancer
medicines, albeit crude ones—and as with carpet bombing, collateral
damage is a given. But now, thanks to advances in genetics, we know that
each cancer is unique, and research is shifting to the development of
personalized medicines—designer therapies that can exterminate specific
cancerous cells in a specific way, in a specific person; therapies
focused like lasers.

To be sure, around the turn of the millennium, significant fanfare
surrounded personalized medicine, especially in the field of genetics. A
lot of that is now gone. The prevailing wisdom is that the tech has not
lived up to the talk, but this isn’t surprising. Gartner, an
information-technology research-and-advisory firm, has coined the term
hype cycle to describe exactly this sort of phenomenon: a new technology
is introduced with enthusiasm, only to be followed by an emotional low
when it fails to immediately deliver on its promise. But Gartner also
discovered that the cycle doesn’t typically end in what the firm calls
“the trough of disillusionment.” Rising from those ashes is a “slope of
enlightenment”—meaning that when viewed from a longer-term historical
perspective, the majority of these much-hyped groundbreaking
developments do, eventually, break plenty of new ground.

As George Church, a geneticist at Harvard, explains, this is what is now
happening in personalized medicine. “The fields of gene therapies, viral
delivery, and other personalized therapies are progressing rapidly,”
Church says, “with several clinical trials succeeding into Phase 2 and
3,” when the therapies are tried on progressively larger numbers of test
subjects. “Many of these treatments target cells that differ in only
one—rare—genetic variation relative to surrounding cells or
individuals.” The Finnish start-up Oncos Therapeutics has already
treated close to 300 cancer patients using a scaled-down form of this
kind of targeted technology.

These developments are, for the most part, positive—promising better
treatment, new cures, and, eventually, longer life. But it wouldn’t take
much to subvert such therapies and come full circle, turning
personalized medicines into personalized bioweapons. “Right now,” says
Jimmy Lin, a genomics researcher at Washington University in St. Louis
and the founder of Rare Genomics, a nonprofit organization that designs
treatments for rare childhood diseases based on individual genetic
analysis, “we have drugs that target specific cancer mutations. Examples
include Gleevec, Zelboraf, and Xalkori. Vertex,” a pharmaceutical
company based in Massachusetts, “has famously made a drug for
cystic-fibrosis patients with a particular mutation. The genetic
targeting of individuals is a little farther out. But a state-sponsored
program of the Stuxnet variety might be able to accomplish this in a few
years. Of course, this work isn’t very well known, so if you tell most
people about this, they say that the time frame sounds like science
fiction. But when you’re familiar with the research, it’s really
feasible that a well-funded group could pull this off.” We would do well
to begin planning for that possibility sooner rather than later.

If you really want to understand what’s happening in the biosciences,
then you need to understand the rate at which information technology is
accelerating. In 1965, Gordon Moore famously realized that the number of
integrated-circuit components on a computer chip had been doubling
roughly every year since the invention of the integrated circuit in the
late 1950s. Moore, who would go on to co-found Intel, predicted that the
trend would continue “for at least 10 years.” He was right. The trend
did continue for 10 years, and 10 more after that. All told, his
observation has remained accurate for five decades, becoming so durable
that it’s now known as “Moore’s Law” and used by the semi-conductor
industry as a guide for future planning.

Moore’s Law originally stated that every 12 months (it is now 24
months), the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will
double—an example of a pattern known as “exponential growth.” While
linear growth is a slow, sequential proposition (1 becomes 2 becomes 3
becomes 4, etc.), exponential growth is an explosive doubling (1 becomes
2 becomes 4 becomes 8, etc.) with a transformational effect. In the
1970s, the most powerful supercomputer in the world was a Cray. It
required a small room to hold it and cost roughly $8 million. Today, the
iPhone in your pocket is more than 100 times faster and more than 12,000
times cheaper than a Cray. This is exponential growth at work.

In the years since Moore’s observation, scientists have discovered that
the pattern of exponential growth occurs in many other industries and
technologies. The amount of Internet data traffic in a year, the number
of bytes of computer data storage available per dollar, the number of
digital-camera pixels per dollar, and the amount of data transferable
over optical fiber are among the dozens of measures of technological
progress that follow this pattern. In fact, so prevalent is exponential
growth that researchers now suspect it is found in all information-based
technology—that is, any technology used to input, store, process,
retrieve, or transmit digital information.

Over the past few decades, scientists have also come to see that the
four letters of the genetic alphabet—A (adenine), C (cytosine), G
(guanine), and T (thymine)—can be transformed into the ones and zeroes
of binary code, allowing for the easy, electronic manipulation of
genetic information. With this development, biology has turned a corner,
morphing into an information-based science and advancing exponentially.
As a result, the fundamental tools of genetic engineering, tools
designed for the manipulation of life—tools that could easily be
co-opted for destructive purposes—are now radically falling in cost and
rising in power. Today, anyone with a knack for science, a decent
Internet connection, and enough cash to buy a used car has what it takes
to try his hand at bio-hacking.

These developments greatly increase several dangers. The most
nightmarish involve bad actors creating weapons of mass destruction, or
careless scientists unleashing accidental plagues—very real concerns
that urgently need more attention. Personalized bioweapons, the focus of
this story, are a subtler and less catastrophic threat, and perhaps for
that reason, society has barely begun to consider them. Yet once
available, they will, we believe, be put into use much more readily than
bioweapons of mass destruction. For starters, while most criminals might
think twice about mass slaughter, murder is downright commonplace. In
the future, politicians, celebrities, leaders of industry—just about
anyone, really—could be vulnerable to attack-by-disease. Even if fatal,
many such attacks could go undetected, mistaken for death by natural
causes; many others would be difficult to pin on a suspect, especially
given the passage of time between exposure and the appearance of symptoms.

Moreover—as we’ll explore in greater detail—these same scientific
developments will pave the way, eventually, for an entirely new kind of
personal warfare. Imagine inducing extreme paranoia in the CEO of a
large corporation so as to gain a business advantage, for example;
or—further out in the future—infecting shoppers with the urge to
impulse-buy.

We have chosen to focus this investigation mostly on the president’s
bio-security, because the president’s personal welfare is paramount to
national security—and because a discussion of the challenges faced by
those charged with his protection will illuminate just how difficult
(and different) “security” will be, as biotechnology continues to advance.

A direct assault against the president’s genome requires first being
able to decode genomes. Until recently, this was no simple matter. In
1990, when the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of
Health announced their intention to sequence the 3 billion base pairs of
the human genome over the next 15 years, it was considered the most
ambitious life-sciences project ever undertaken. Despite a budget of $3
billion, progress did not come quickly. Even after years of hard work,
many experts doubted that the time and money budgeted would be enough to
complete the job.

This started to change in 1998, when the entrepreneurial biologist J.
Craig Venter and his company, Celera, got into the race. Taking
advantage of the exponential growth in biotechnology, Venter relied on a
new generation of gene sequencers and a novel, computer-intensive
approach called shotgun sequencing to deliver a draft human genome (his
own) in less than two years, for $300 million.

Venter’s achievement was stunning; it was also just the beginning. By
2007, just seven years later, a human genome could be sequenced for less
than $1 million. In 2008, some labs would do it for $60,000, and in
2009, $5,000. This year, the $1,000 barrier looks likely to fall. At the
current rate of decline, within five years, the cost will be less than
$100. In the history of the world, perhaps no other technology has
dropped in price and increased in performance so dramatically.

Still, it would take more than just a gene sequencer to build a
personally targeted bioweapon. To begin with, prospective attackers
would have to collect and grow live cells from the target (more on this
later), so cell-culturing tools would be a necessity. Next, a molecular
profile of the cells would need to be generated, involving gene
sequencers, micro-array scanners, mass spectrometers, and more. Once a
detailed genetic blueprint had been built, the attacker could begin to
design, build, and test a pathogen, which starts with genetic databases
and software and ends with virus and cell-culture work. Gathering the
equipment required to do all of this isn’t trivial, and yet, as
researchers have upgraded to new tools, as large companies have merged
and consolidated operations, and as smaller shops have run out of money
and failed, plenty of used lab equipment has been dumped onto the resale
market. New, the requisite gear would cost well over $1 million. On
eBay, it can be had for as little as $10,000. Strip out the analysis
equipment—since those processes can now be outsourced—and a basic
cell-culture rig can be cobbled together for less than $1,000. Chemicals
and lab supplies have never been easier to buy; hundreds of Web
resellers take credit cards and ship almost anywhere.

Biological knowledge, too, is becoming increasingly democratized. Web
sites like JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) provide thousands of
how-to videos on the techniques of bioscience. MIT offers online
courses. Many journals are going open-access, making the latest
research, complete with detailed sections on materials and methods,
freely available. If you wanted a more hands-on approach to learning,
you could just immerse yourself in any of the dozens of
do-it-yourself-biology organizations, such as Genspace and BioCurious,
that have lately sprung up to make genetic engineering into something of
a hobbyist’s pursuit. Bill Gates, in a recent interview, told a reporter
that if he were a kid today, forget about hacking computers: he’d be
hacking biology. And for those with neither the lab nor the learning,
dozens of Contract Research and Manufacturing Services (known as CRAMS)
are willing to do much of the serious science for a fee.

From the invention of genetic engineering in 1972 until very recently,
the high cost of equipment, and the high cost of education to use that
equipment effectively, kept most people with ill intentions away from
these technologies. Those barriers to entry are now almost gone.
“Unfortunately,” Secretary Clinton said in a December 7, 2011, speech to
the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention Review Conference, “the
ability of terrorists and other non-state actors to develop and use
these weapons is growing. And therefore, this must be a renewed focus of
our efforts … because there are warning signs, and they are too serious
to ignore.”

The radical expansion of biology’s frontier raises an uncomfortable
question: How do you guard against threats that don’t yet exist? Genetic
engineering sits at the edge of a new era. The old era belonged to DNA
sequencing, which is simply the act of reading genetic code—identifying
and extracting meaning from the ordering of the four chemicals that make
up DNA. But now we’re learning how to write DNA, and this creates
possibilities both grand and terrifying.

Again, Craig Venter helped to usher in this shift. In the mid‑1990s,
just before he began his work to read the human genome, he began
wondering what it would take to write one. He wanted to know what the
minimal genome required for life looked like. It was a good question.
Back then, DNA-synthesis technology was too crude and expensive for
anyone to consider writing a minimal genome for life or, more to our
point, constructing a sophisticated bioweapon. And gene-splicing
techniques, which involve the tricky work of using enzymes to cut up
existing DNA from one or more organisms and stitch it back together,
were too unwieldy for the task.

Exponential advances in biotechnology have greatly diminished these
problems. The latest technology—known as synthetic biology, or
“synbio”—moves the work from the molecular to the digital. Genetic code
is manipulated using the equivalent of a word processor. With the press
of a button, code representing DNA can be cut and pasted, effortlessly
imported from one species into another. It can be reused and repurposed.
DNA bases can be swapped in and out with precision. And once the code
looks right? Simply hit Send. A dozen different DNA print shops can now
turn these bits into biology.

In May 2010, with the help of these new tools, Venter answered his own
question by creating the world’s first synthetic self-replicating
chromosome. To pull this off, he used a computer to design a novel
bacterial genome (of more than 1 million base pairs in total). Once the
design was complete, the code was e‑mailed to Blue Heron Biotechnology,
a Seattle-area company that specializes in synthesizing DNA from digital
blueprints. Blue Heron took Venter’s A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s and returned
multiple vials filled with frozen plasmid DNA. Just as one might load an
operating system into a computer, Venter then inserted the synthetic DNA
into a host bacterial cell that had been emptied of its own DNA. The
cell soon began generating proteins, or, to use the computer term
popular with today’s biologists, it “booted up”: it started to
metabolize, grow, and, most important, divide, based entirely on the
code of the injected DNA. One cell became two, two became four, four
became eight. And each new cell carried only Venter’s synthetic
instructions. For all practical purposes, it was an altogether new life
form, created virtually from scratch. Venter called it “the first
self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a
computer.”

But Venter merely grazed the surface. Plummeting costs and increasing
technical simplicity are allowing synthetic biologists to tinker with
life in ways never before feasible. In 2006, for example, Jay D.
Keasling, a biochemical engineer at the University of California at
Berkeley, stitched together 10 synthetic genes made from the genetic
blueprints of three different organisms to create a novel yeast that can
manufacture the precursor to the antimalarial drug artemisinin,
artemisinic acid, natural supplies of which fluctuate greatly.
Meanwhile, Venter’s company Synthetic Genomics is working in partnership
with ExxonMobil on a designer algae that consumes carbon dioxide and
excretes biofuel; his spin-off company Synthetic Genomics Vaccines is
trying to develop flu-fighting vaccines that can be made in hours or
days instead of the six-plus months now required. Solazyme, a synbio
company based in San Francisco, is making biodiesel with engineered
micro-algae. Material scientists are also getting in on the action:
DuPont and Tate & Lyle, for instance, have jointly designed a highly
efficient and environmentally friendly organism that ingests corn sugar
and excretes propanediol, a substance used in a wide range of consumer
goods, from cosmetics to cleaning products.
Bill Gates, in a recent interview, told a reporter that if he were a kid
today, forget about hacking computers: he’d be hacking biology.

Other synthetic biologists are playing with more-fundamental cellular
mechanisms. The Florida-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution
has added two bases (Z and P) to DNA’s traditional four, augmenting the
old genetic alphabet. At Harvard, George Church has supercharged
evolution with his Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering process, which
randomly swaps multiple genes at once. Instead of creating novel genomes
one at a time, MAGE creates billions of variants in a matter of days.

Finally, because synbio makes DNA design, synthesis, and assembly
easier, we’re already moving from the tweaking of existing genetic
designs to the construction of new organisms—species that have never
before been seen on Earth, species birthed entirely by our imagination.
Since we can control the environments these organisms will live
in—adjusting things like temperature, pressure, and food sources while
eliminating competitors and other stresses—we could soon be generating
creatures capable of feats impossible in the “natural” world. Imagine
organisms that can thrive on the surface of Mars, or enzymes able to
change simple carbon into diamonds or nanotubes. The ultimate limits to
synthetic biology are hard to discern.

All of this means that our interactions with biology, already
complicated, are about to get a lot more troublesome. Mixing together
code from multiple species or creating novel organisms could have
unintended consequences. And even in labs with high safety standards,
accidents happen. If those accidents involve a containment breach, what
is today a harmless laboratory bacterium could tomorrow become an
ecological catastrophe. A 2010 synbio report by the Presidential
Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues said as much: “Unmanaged
release could, in theory, lead to undesired cross-breeding with other
organisms, uncontrolled proliferation, crowding out of existing species,
and threats to biodiversity.”

Just as worrisome as bio-error is the threat of bioterror. Although the
bacterium Venter created is essentially harmless to humans, the same
techniques could be used to construct a known pathogenic virus or
bacterium or, worse, to engineer a much deadlier version of one. Viruses
are particularly easy to synthetically engineer, a fact made apparent in
2002, when Eckard Wimmer, a Stony Brook University virologist,
chemically synthesized the polio genome using mail-order DNA. At the
time, the 7,500-nucleotide synthesis cost about $300,000 and took
several years to complete. Today, a similar synthesis would take just
weeks and cost a few thousand dollars. By 2020, if trends continue, it
will take a few minutes and cost roughly $3. Governments the world over
have spent billions trying to eradicate polio; imagine the damage
terrorists could do with a $3 pathogen.
During the 1990s, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, infamous for its
deadly 1995 sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, maintained an
active and extremely well-funded bioweapons program, which included
anthrax in its arsenal. When police officers eventually raided its
facilities, they found proof of a years-long research effort costing an
estimated $30 million—demonstrating, among other things, that terrorists
clearly see value in pursuing bioweaponry. Although Aum did manage to
cause considerable harm, it failed in its attempts to unleash a
bioweapon of mass destruction. In a 2001 article for Studies in Conflict
& Terrorism, William Rosenau, a terrorism expert then at the Rand
Corporation, explained:

Aum’s failure suggests that it may, in fact, be far more difficult
to carry out a deadly bioterrorism attack than has sometimes been
portrayed by government officials and the press. Despite its significant
financial resources, dedicated personnel, motivation, and freedom from
the scrutiny of the Japanese authorities, Aum was unable to achieve its
objectives.

That was then; this is now. Today, two trends are changing the game. The
first began in 2004, when the International Genetically Engineered
Machine (iGEM) competition was launched at MIT. In this competition,
teams of high-school and college students build simple biological
systems from standardized, interchangeable parts. These standardized
parts, now known as BioBricks, are chunks of DNA code, with clearly
defined structures and functions, that can be easily linked together in
new combinations, a little like a set of genetic Lego bricks. iGEM
collects these designs in the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, an
open-source database of downloadable BioBricks accessible to anyone.
Viruses are particularly easy to synthetically engineer. In 2002, Eckard
Wimmer synthesized the polio genome from mail-order DNA.

Over the years, iGEM teams have pushed not only technical barriers but
creative ones as well. By 2008, students were designing organisms with
real-world applications; the contest that year was won by a team from
Slovenia for its designer vaccine against Helicobacter pylori, the
bacterium responsible for most ulcers. The 2011 grand-prize winner, a
team from the University of Washington, completed three separate
projects, each one rivaling the outputs of world-class academics and the
biopharmaceutical industry. Teams have turned bacterial cells into
everything from photographic film to hemoglobin-producing blood
substitutes to miniature hard drives, complete with data encryption.

As the sophistication of iGEM research has risen, so has the level of
participation. In 2004, five teams submitted 50 potential BioBricks to
the registry. Two years later, 32 teams submitted 724 parts. By 2010,
iGEM had mushroomed to 130 teams submitting 1,863 parts—and the registry
database was more than 5,000 components strong. As The New York Times
pointed out:

iGEM has been grooming an entire generation of the world’s
brightest scientific minds to embrace synthetic biology’s vision—without
anyone really noticing, before the public debates and regulations that
typically place checks on such risky and ethically controversial new
technologies have even started.

(igem itself does require students to be mindful of any ethical or
safety issues, and encourages public discourse on these questions.)

The second trend to consider is the progress that terrorist and criminal
organizations have made with just about every other information
technology. Since the birth of the digital revolution, some early
adopters have turned out to be rogue actors. Phone phreakers like John
Draper (a k a “Captain Crunch”) discovered back in the 1970s that AT&T’s
telephone network could be fooled into allowing free calls with the help
of a plastic whistle given away in cereal boxes (thus Draper’s moniker).
In the 1980s, early desktop computers were subverted by a sophisticated
array of computer viruses for malicious fun—then, in the 1990s, for
information theft and financial gain. The 2000s saw purportedly
uncrackable credit-card cryptographic algorithms reverse-engineered and
smartphones repeatedly infected with malware. On a larger scale,
denial-of-service attacks have grown increasingly destructive, crippling
everything from individual Web sites to massive financial networks. In
2000, “Mafiaboy,” a Canadian high-school student acting alone, managed
to freeze or slow down the Web sites of Yahoo, eBay, CNN, Amazon, and Dell.

In 2007, Russian hackers swamped Estonian Web sites, disrupting
financial institutions, broadcasting networks, government ministries,
and the Estonian parliament. A year later, the nation of Georgia, before
the Russian invasion, saw a massive cyberattack paralyze its banking
system and disrupt cellphone networks. Iraqi insurgents subsequently
repurposed SkyGrabber—cheap Russian software frequently used to steal
satellite television—to intercept the video feeds of U.S. Predator
drones in order to monitor and evade American military operations.

Lately, organized crime has taken up crowd-sourcing parts of its illegal
operations—printing up fake credit cards, money laundering—to people or
groups with specialized skills. (In Japan, the yakuza has even begun to
outsource murder, to Chinese gangs.) Given the anonymous nature of the
online crowd, it is all but impossible for law enforcement to track
these efforts.

The historical trend is clear: Whenever novel technologies enter the
market, illegitimate uses quickly follow legitimate ones. A black market
soon appears. Thus, just as criminals and terrorists have exploited many
other forms of technology, they will surely soon turn to synthetic
biology, the latest digital frontier.

In 2005, as part of its preparation for this threat, the FBI hired
Edward You, a cancer researcher at Amgen and formerly a gene therapist
at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. You,
now a supervisory special agent in the Weapons of Mass Destruction
Directorate within the FBI’s Biological Countermeasures Unit, knew that
biotechnology had been expanding too quickly for the bureau to keep
pace, so he decided the only way to stay ahead of the curve was to
develop partnerships with those at the leading edge. “When I got
involved,” You says, “it was pretty clear the FBI wasn’t about to start
playing Big Brother to the life sciences. It’s not our mandate, and it’s
not possible. All the expertise lies in the scientific community. Our
job has to be outreach education. We need to create a culture of
security in the synbio community, of responsible science, so the
researchers themselves understand that they are the guardians of the
future.”

Toward that end, the FBI started hosting free bio-security conferences,
stationed WMD outreach coordinators in 56 field offices to network with
the synbio community (among other responsibilities), and became an iGEM
partner. In 2006, after reporters at The Guardian successfully
mail-ordered a crippled fragment of the genome for the smallpox virus,
suppliers of genetic materials decided to develop self-policing
guidelines. According to You, the FBI sees the organic emergence of
these guidelines as proof that its community-based policing approach is
working. However, we are not so sure these new rules do much besides
guarantee that a pathogen isn’t sent to a P.O. box.

In any case, much more is necessary. An October 2011 report by the WMD
Center, a nonprofit organization led by former Senators Bob Graham (a
Democrat) and Jim Talent (a Republican), said a terrorist-sponsored WMD
strike somewhere in the world was probable by the end of 2013—and that
the weapon would most likely be biological. The report specifically
highlighted the dangers of synthetic biology:

As DNA synthesis technology continues to advance at a rapid pace,
it will soon become feasible to synthesize nearly any virus whose DNA
sequence has been decoded … as well as artificial microbes that do not
exist in nature. This growing ability to engineer life at the molecular
level carries with it the risk of facilitating the development of new
and more deadly biological weapons.

Malevolent non-state actors are not the only danger to consider. Forty
nations now host synbio research, China among them. The Beijing Genomics
Institute, founded in 1999, is the largest genomic-research organization
in the world, sequencing the equivalent of roughly 700,000 human genomes
a year. (In a recent Science article, BGI claimed to have more
sequencing capacity than all U.S. labs combined.) Last year, during a
German E. coli outbreak, when concerns were raised that the disease was
a new, particularly deadly strain, BGI sequenced the culprit in just
three days. To put that in perspective, SARS—the deadly pneumonia
variant that panicked the world in 2003—was sequenced in 31 days. And
BGI appears poised to move beyond DNA sequencing and become one of the
foremost DNA synthesizers as well.

BGI hires thousands of bright young researchers each year. The training
is great, but the wages are reportedly low. This means that many of its
talented synthetic biologists may well be searching for better pay and
greener pastures each year, too. Some of those jobs will undoubtedly
appear in countries not yet on the synbio radar. Iran, North Korea, and
Pakistan will almost certainly be hiring.

In the run-up to Barack Obama’s inauguration, threats against the
incoming president rose markedly. Each of those threats had to be
thoroughly investigated. In his book on the Secret Service, Ronald
Kessler writes that in January 2009, for example, when intelligence
emerged that the Somalia-based Islamist group al‑Shabaab might try to
disrupt Obama’s inauguration, the Secret Service’s mandate for that day
became even harder. In total, Kessler reports, the Service coordinated
some 40,000 agents and officers from 94 police, military, and security
agencies. Bomb-sniffing dogs were deployed throughout the area, and
counter-sniper teams were stationed along the parade route. This is a
considerable response capability, but in the future, it won’t be enough.
A complete defense against the weapons that synbio could make possible
has yet to be invented.

The range of threats that the Secret Service has to guard against
already extends far beyond firearms and explosive devices. Both chemical
and radiological attacks have been launched against government officials
in recent years. In 2004, the poisoning of the Ukrainian presidential
candidate Viktor Yushchenko involved TCCD, an extremely toxic dioxin
compound. Yushchenko survived, but was severely scarred by chemically
induced lesions. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the
Russian security service, was poisoned to death with the radioisotope
polonium 210. And the use of bioweapons themselves is hardly unknown;
the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States nearly reached members of
the Senate.

The Kremlin, of course, has been suspected of poisoning its enemies for
decades, and anthrax has been around for a while. But genetic
technologies open the door for a new threat, in which a head of state’s
own DNA could be used against him or her. This is particularly difficult
to defend against. No amount of Secret Service vigilance can ever fully
secure the president’s DNA, because an entire genetic blueprint can now
be produced from the information within just a single cell. Each of us
sheds millions and millions of cells every day. These can be collected
from any number of sources—a used tissue, a drinking glass, a
toothbrush. Every time President Obama shakes hands with a constituent,
Cabinet member, or foreign leader, he’s leaving an exploitable genetic
trail. Whenever he gives away a pen at a bill-signing ceremony, he gives
away a few cells too. These cells are dead, but the DNA is intact,
allowing for the revelation of potentially compromising details of the
president’s biology.

To build a bioweapon, living cells would be the true target (although
dead cells may suffice as soon as a decade from now). These are more
difficult to recover. A strand of hair, for example, is dead, but if
that hair contains a follicle, it also contains living cells. A sample
gathered from fresh blood or saliva, or even a sneeze, caught in a
discarded tissue, could suffice. Once recovered, these living cells can
be cultured, providing a continuous supply of research material.

Even if Secret Service agents were able to sweep up all the shed cells
from the president’s current environs, they couldn’t stop the recovery
of DNA from the president’s past. DNA is a very stable molecule, and can
last for millennia. Genetic material remains present on old clothes,
high-school papers—any of the myriad objects handled and discarded long
before the announcement of a presidential candidacy. How much attention
was dedicated to protecting Barack Obama’s DNA when he was a senator? A
community organizer in Chicago? A student at Harvard Law? A
kindergartner? And even if presidential DNA were somehow fully locked
down, a good approximation of the code could be made from cells of the
president’s children, parents, or siblings, living or not.

Presidential DNA could be used in a variety of politically sensitive
ways, perhaps to fabricate evidence of an affair, fuel speculation about
birthplace and heritage, or identify genetic markers for diseases that
could cast doubt on leadership ability and mental acuity. How much would
it take to unseat a president? The first signs of Ronald Reagan’s
Alzheimer’s may have emerged during his second term. Some doctors today
feel the disease was then either latent or too mild to affect his
ability to govern. But if information about his condition had been
genetically confirmed and made public, would the American people have
demanded his resignation? Could Congress have been forced to impeach him?

For the Secret Service, these new vulnerabilities conjure attack
scenarios worthy of a Hollywood thriller. Advances in stem-cell research
make any living cell transformable into many other cell types, including
neurons or heart cells or even in vitro–derived (IVD) “sperm.” Any live
cells recovered from a dirty glass or a crumpled napkin could, in
theory, be used to manufacture synthetic sperm cells. And so, out of the
blue, a president could be confronted by a “former lover” coming forward
with DNA evidence of a sexual encounter, like a semen stain on a dress.
Sophisticated testing could distinguish an IVD fake sperm from the real
thing—they would not be identical—but the results might never be
convincing to the lay public. IVD sperm may also someday prove capable
of fertilizing eggs, allowing for “love children” to be born using
standard in vitro fertilization.
In the hope of mounting the best defense, one option is radical
transparency: release the president’s DNA.

As mentioned, even modern cancer therapies could be harnessed for
malicious ends. Personalized therapies designed to attack a specific
patient’s cancer cells are already moving into clinical trials.
Synthetic biology is poised to expand and accelerate this process by
making individualized viral therapies inexpensive. Such “magic bullets”
can target cancer cells with precision. But what if these bullets were
trained to attack healthy cells instead? Trained against retinal cells,
they would produce blindness. Against the hippocampus, a memory wipe may
result. And the liver? Death would follow in months.

The delivery of this sort of biological agent would be very difficult to
detect. Viruses are tasteless and odorless and easily aerosolized. They
could be hidden in a perfume bottle; a quick dab on the attacker’s wrist
in the general proximity of the target is all an assassination attempt
would require. If the pathogen were designed to zero in specifically on
the president’s DNA, then nobody else would even fall ill. No one would
suspect an attack until long after the infection.

Pernicious agents could be crafted to do their damage months or even
years after exposure, depending on the goals of the designer. Several
viruses are already known to spark cancers. New ones could eventually be
designed to infect the brain with, for instance, synthetic
schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or Alzheimer’s. Stranger possibilities
exist as well. A disease engineered to amplify the production of
cortisol and dopamine could induce extreme paranoia, turning, say, a
peace-seeking dove into a warmongering hawk. Or a virus that boosts the
production of oxytocin, the chemical likely responsible for feelings of
trust, could play hell with a leader’s negotiating abilities. Some of
these ideas aren’t new. As far back as 1994, the U.S. Air Force’s Wright
Laboratory theorized about chemical-based pheromone bombs.

Of course, heads of state would not be the only ones vulnerable to
synbio threats. Al‑Qaeda flew planes into buildings to cripple Wall
Street, but imagine the damage an attack targeting the CEOs of a number
of Fortune 500 companies could do to the world economy. Forget
kidnapping rich foreign nationals for ransom; kidnapping their DNA might
one day be enough. Celebrities will face a new kind of stalker. As
home-brew biology matures, these technologies could end up being used to
“settle” all sorts of disputes, even those of the domestic variety.
Without question, we are near the dawn of a brave new world.

How might we protect the president in the years ahead, as biotech
continues to advance? Despite the acceleration of readily exploitable
biotechnology, the Secret Service is not powerless. Steps can be taken
to limit risks. The agency would not reveal what defenses are already in
place, but establishing a crack scientific task force within the agency
to monitor, forecast, and evaluate new biotechnological risks would be
an obvious place to start. Deploying sensing technologies is another
possibility. Already, bio-detectors have been built that can sense known
pathogens in less than three minutes. These can get better—a lot
better—but even so, they might be limited in their effectiveness.
Because synbio opens the door to new, finely targeted pathogens, we’d
need to detect that which we’ve never seen before. In this, however, the
Secret Service has a big advantage over the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention or the World Health Organization: its principal
responsibility is the protection of one specific person. Bio-sensing
technologies could be developed around the president’s actual genome. We
could use his living cells to build an early-warning system with
molecular accuracy.

Cultures of live cells taken from the president could also be kept at
the ready—the biological equivalent to data backups. The Secret Service
reportedly already carries several pints of blood of the president’s
type in his motorcade, in case an emergency transfusion becomes
necessary. These biological backup systems could be expanded to include
“clean DNA”—essentially, verified stem-cell libraries that would allow
bone-marrow transplantation or the enhancement of antiviral or
antimicrobial capabilities. As so-called tissue-printing technologies
improve, the president’s cells could even be turned, one day, into
ready-made standby replacement organs.

Yet even if the Secret Service were to implement some or all of these
measures, there is no guarantee that the presidential genome could be
completely protected. Anyone truly determined to get the president’s DNA
would probably succeed, no matter the defenses. And the Secret Service
might have to accept that it can’t fully counter all bio-threats, any
more than it can guarantee that the president will never catch a cold.

In the hope of mounting the best defense against an attack, one possible
solution—not without its drawbacks—is radical transparency: release the
president’s DNA and other relevant biological data, either to a select
group of security-cleared bioscience researchers or (the far more
controversial step) to the public at large. These ideas may seem
counterintuitive, but we have come to believe that open-sourcing this
problem—and actively engaging the American public in the challenge of
protecting its leader—might turn out to be the best defense.

One practical reason is cost. Any in-house protection effort would be
exceptionally pricey. Certainly, considering what’s at stake, the
country would bear the expense, but is that the best solution? After
all, over the past five years, DIY Drones, a nonprofit online community
of autonomous aircraft hobbyists (working for free, in their spare
time), produced a $300 unmanned aerial vehicle with 90 percent of the
functionality of the military’s $35,000 Raven. This kind of price
reduction is typical of open-sourced projects.

Moreover, conducting bio-security in-house means attracting and
retaining a very high level of talent. This puts the Secret Service in
competition with industry—a fiscally untenable position—and with
academia, which offers researchers the freedom to tackle a wider range
of interesting problems. But by tapping the collective intelligence of
the life-sciences community, the agency would enlist the help of the
group best prepared to address this problem, at no cost.

Open-sourcing the president’s genetic information to a select group of
security-cleared researchers would bring other benefits as well. It
would allow the life sciences to follow in the footsteps of the computer
sciences, where “red-team exercises,” or “penetration testing,” are
extremely common practices. In these exercises, the red team—usually a
group of faux-black-hat hackers—attempts to find weaknesses in an
organization’s defenses (the blue team). A similar testing environment
could be developed for biological war games.

One of the reasons this kind of practice has been so widely instituted
in the computer world is that the speed of development far exceeds the
ability of any individual security expert, working alone, to keep pace.
Because the life sciences are now advancing faster than computing,
little short of an internal Manhattan Project–style effort could put the
Secret Service ahead of this curve. The FBI has far greater resources at
its disposal than the Secret Service; almost 36,000 people work there,
for instance, compared with fewer than 7,000 at the Secret Service. Yet
Edward You and the FBI reviewed this same problem and concluded that the
only way the bureau could keep up with biological threats was by
involving the whole of the life-sciences community.

So why go further? Why take the radical step of releasing the
president’s genome to the world instead of just to researchers with
security clearances? For one thing, as the U.S. State Department’s
DNA-gathering mandate makes clear, the surreptitious collection of world
leaders’ genetic material has already begun. It would not be surprising
if the president’s DNA has already been collected and analyzed by
America’s adversaries. Nor is it unthinkable, given our increasingly
nasty party politics, that the president’s domestic political opponents
are in possession of his DNA. In the November 2008 issue of The New
England Journal of Medicine, Robert C. Green and George J. Annas warned
of this possibility, writing that by the 2012 election, “advances in
genomics will make it more likely that DNA will be collected and
analyzed to assess genetic risk information that could be used for or,
more likely, against presidential candidates.” It’s also not hard to
imagine the rise of a biological analog to the computer-hacking group
Anonymous, intent on providing a transparent picture of world leaders’
genomes and medical histories. Sooner or later, even without
open-sourcing, a president’s genome will end up in the public eye.

So the question becomes: Is it more dangerous to play defense and hope
for the best, or to go on offense and prepare for the worst? Neither
choice is terrific, but even beyond the important issues of cost and
talent attraction, open-sourcing—as Claire Fraser, the director of the
Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of
Medicine, points out—“would level the playing field, removing the need
for intelligence agencies to plan for every possible worst-case scenario.”

It would also let the White House preempt the media storm that would
occur if someone else leaked the president’s genome. In addition,
constant scrutiny of the president’s genome would allow us to establish
a baseline and track genetic changes over time, producing an exceptional
level of early detection of cancers and other metabolic diseases. And if
such diseases were found, an open-sourced genome could likewise
accelerate the development of personalized therapies.

The largest factor to consider is time. In 2008, some 14,000 people were
working in U.S. labs with access to seriously pathogenic materials; we
don’t know how many tens of thousands more are doing the same overseas.
Outside those labs, the tools and techniques of genetic engineering are
accessible to many other people. Back in 2003, a panel of life-sciences
experts, convened by the National Academy of Sciences for the CIA’s
Strategic Assessments Group, noted that because the processes and
techniques needed for the development of advanced bio agents can be used
for good or for ill, distinguishing legitimate research from research
for the production of bioweapons will soon be extremely difficult. As a
result, “most panelists argued that a qualitatively different
relationship between the government and life sciences communities might
be needed to most effectively grapple with the future BW threat.”

In our view, it’s no longer a question of “might be.” Advances in
biotechnology are radically changing the scientific landscape. We are
entering a world where imagination is the only brake on biology, where
dedicated individuals can create new life from scratch. Today, when a
difficult problem is mentioned, a commonly heard refrain is There’s an
app for that. Sooner than you might believe, an app will be replaced by
an organism when we think about the solutions to many problems. In light
of this coming synbio revolution, a wider-ranging relationship between
scientists and security organizations—one defined by open exchange,
continual collaboration, and crowd-sourced defenses—may prove the only
way to protect the president. And, in the process, the rest of us.